


A Scandal in Brichester

by madgirl



Category: A Study in Emerald - Neil Gaiman, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Lovecraftian, Pastiche, Yuletide 2013
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:10:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madgirl/pseuds/madgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Holmes and Watson take on a case for the royal family. Even in 2013 the Old Ones can't do everything themselves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Scandal in Brichester

**Author's Note:**

  * For [uschickens](https://archiveofourown.org/users/uschickens/gifts).



> A mixed pastiche that borrows heavily from both A Scandal in Belgravia and A Scandal in Bohemia. Thank you as well to Ramsey Campbell for Brichester, which appears in his Lovecraftian tales as a sort of British equivalent to Arkham.

To Sherlock Holmes, she will always be _the_ woman.

He never mentions her by name now, and if he even thinks it will cross _my_ lips, he stalls them with one of his cold steel gazes. I know with as much certainty as I feel about anything that Sherlock did not love her, and am nearly as certain that he did not desire her, if he is even capable of such emotions at all. But I remember the expression on his face as he looked down at her body, cold and gray and dripping with green ichor, her blood staining the wet slab of rock. No, he might not have loved her, but in that moment Irene Adler predominated the whole of her gender, and he would never feel for another woman what he felt then for her corpse.

It started, as a lot of things seemed to those days, when Sherlock was bored. A string of potential clients had come parading into 221B, and he had either sent them away - “Bored now.” “Not worth my time.” “Goodbye.” “See them out, John.” - or solved the thing on the spot simply by hearing the details. I blogged about those anyway, because I was running out of material, and Sherlock looked over my shoulder afterwards and disparaged my titles. Still, I was rather fond of “The Geek Interpreter” as well as “The MySpace of Madness.”

Honestly, the appearance of a distraught father (with a tale of his missing son who had taken a holiday from university to visit Massachusetts) had me hoping for a trip to America for a case. But it took perhaps thirty seconds for Sherlock to deduce he’d gone to Innsmouth (at which point I changed my mind about the trip, because _that_ certainly wasn’t much of a tourist destination these days), and another couple of minutes for a phone call to the only nearby hotel to verify that a British lad had checked in but then never returned. Sherlock had advised the man to take a closer look at his family tree, because it was likely the boy had discovered something about his lineage and decided to stay there and wait to ascend into the second form that was his birthright.

After the man left, I pecked away at my laptop keyboard for a moment and asked Sherlock, “Are you an expert on the genealogy of the royal families now?” 

“Oh, _please_ ,” was Sherlock’s response as he wandered back over to a microscope he’d set up on the kitchen table just beside a bowl of fruit and that morning’s tea and biscuits. I took this response to mean he was insulted I would dare question that he wasn’t an expert in everything. I peered closer and noticed that the microscope slide was covered in something viscous and bright emerald in color.

Later, when I was typing up that particular blog post, Sherlock looked over my shoulder and informed me that “The Sheraton Over Innsmouth” was a silly title, since the hotel was hardly an important part of the story. “I need to call it something,” I said. “Cases involving the Old Ones always get the most hits.”

“I don’t want anymore hits,” he said. “I’m still unhappy about the hat.”

“We need clients, Sherlock. I enjoy eating and having a roof over my head.” Only then did I look up and notice that Sherlock was wearing nothing but a sheet. “Where are your clothes?” I didn’t ask this question with as much surprise as one might have expected. Very little surprised me at all anymore when it came to Sherlock Holmes.

“In my drawers, in my closet, in a hamper in my bathroom,” Sherlock said. “We agreed, I won’t leave the apartment for anything less than a seven. So far, there’s no need for me to go anywhere today.”

“Considering that we live together I would appreciate if you’d put on pants anyway,” I said.

“You are also less than a seven right now,” Sherlock said.

I wasn’t certain I wanted to know what that meant. “I’m going to pick up more milk,” I said, slamming the laptop closed. “You used the last of it this morning in one of your experiments, didn’t you.”

“Nothing else properly mimics the aquatic conditions of R’lyeh, since it’s rather more than water, all that protein... If you’d like to travel there and fetch samples so that I can stop approximating, feel free.” He stood, sheet dragging, and plopped himself down in front of his microscope again.

I decided to ignore this suggestion, and simply picked up my coat and made my way out of 221B. When I returned half an hour later, Sherlock was gone. In his place was a figure in a dark cloak. Hooded. Face hidden. 

“John, there’s a cultist waiting for - “ Mrs. Hudson called from the bottom of the stairs, but then saw me standing there at the top with the hooded figure. “Oh, nevermind, I see you’ve already met. Carry on, then. Please no rituals in the apartment though, Sherlock’s experiments are already doing enough damage to the property value.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Hudson,” I said politely. I looked up at the cultist. “I hope you haven’t done anything unsavory to my friend.”

“Come with me,” he said, and I did, because something you learned after a time about cultists is that they were rarely alone, and there was power in slowly-chanting numbers.

The dark car had tinted windows, and it drove for some time, long enough that I think I may have dozed off for a bit so I wasn’t entirely certain how far outside of London we had journeyed. When I was ushered from the car I found myself in what appeared to be a library, filled with dusty tomes and heavy architecture. Sherlock Holmes was seated on a bench wearing nothing but a sheet.

“Not yet a seven?” I commented as I sat down on the other side of the bench.

“Cultists alone are not that interesting,” he said. “I don’t yet know who our client is.”

“Do you know where we are?” I asked him.

“Brichester,” he said. “In the library of the Miskatonic University satellite campus.”

“Oh,” I said, blinking. Though the small town of Brichester had once had an impressively mundane surface, that surface had infamously begun to crack in the past several decades as it became more clear that it was the center of a great deal of activity relating to the royal families occurring in Severn Valley. The Queen certainly could not reside in Belgravia - though in her younger days Victoria Gloriana had kept to a palace, it had eventually become clear that she preferred to rule from darker, danker spaces - and a prominent theory was that she kept court somewhere in the recesses of Severn Valley. “Are you certain this isn’t a seven?”

“I don’t like to make assumptions,” Sherlock said, which was, of course, a ludicrous statement.

“Do you think we’re going to see something terrifying and inhuman?” I whispered.

Sherlock glanced up, and when I followed his gaze I saw his brother walking towards us. “It appears so,” Sherlock said, and a smile twitched spastically at his lips.

And then, because this was all truly absurd, we both began to laugh. The sound echoed from the high, cavernous walls of the library and came back to us sounding like wails. 

“Show some respect,” snapped Mycroft Holmes as he pulled down his hood with one hand. In his other he held a folded bundle of clothing that I could only assume was another set of robes. “Put these on, Sherlock.”

“What for?” 

“For your client.” At this exchange between the two of them I began to have very detailed ideas about what their childhood had been like.

“Who is?”

“Glorious,” bellowed another voice, coming into the room, “in the extreme.” I might have recognized the figure as the cultist who had fetched me, but honestly, one cultist looks the same as another these days. The only reason I recognized Mycroft was the shine of his shoes. 

Sherlock looked very much as if he wanted to argue, but even he had, in the end, a healthy amount of fear for the royal family. So he only nodded. He did sit back down without taking the robes, however.

Mycroft and the hooded figure sat down on the bench facing us.

“Your client has a problem that needs a solution,” Mycroft said. “Do you know anything about this woman?” He pulled out a set of photographs and passed them to Sherlock. I looked over his shoulder and saw images of a beautiful, dark-haired woman with blood red lips and, in each photograph, varying degrees of very little clothing. 

Sherlock seemed unimpressed. “No,” he said.

“Her name is Irene Adler,” said Mycroft. “There are many names for what she does, but she prefers the term _sacrifice._ ”

At that, my eyebrows shot up. But Cultist #2 was still spooking me a bit so I kept my mouth shut and let Sherlock do the talking.

“Sacrifice,” repeated Sherlock in a murmur, looking down at the photographs.

“Don’t be alarmed,” said Mycroft. “It’s not all to do with death. Some of it is sex. Or just blood.”

“Neither sex nor blood alarm me,” Sherlock said sharply, and Mycroft only smirked. “And so I assume that this Adler woman has some involvement with a member of the royal family, and you do not want this information to get out.”

“In accordance with the duties for which she was being prepared, Miss Adler was given details on a number of rituals, including access to some of the prohibited chapters of The Necronomicon.”

“Let me guess. She stole them.”

“Took photographs,” said Mycroft. “The woman cannot be harmed. She is too important. But we need to ensure that those images do not get into the wrong hands.”

“What does she want them for?” Sherlock asked.

“You’re the detective,” Mycroft said dryly.

Sherlock stood, picking up the bottom of his sheet so that he could walk. “Text me her information. I’ll have the photographs back to you by morning.”

And though Sherlock did a great deal of planning to take Miss Adler unawares, when we found ourselves face to face with her later that evening, I immediately guessed that she’d already known we were coming. It was not so much that she was _naked_ , but that she was naked and covered in intricately drawn runes. I’d come to have a healthy fear of runes. 

When Sherlock stared so openly at her, I honestly wasn’t certain whether it was because he was unaccustomed to seeing a naked woman or whether he was trying to memorize the runes on her body.

“Don’t bother trying to remember your alias, Mr. Holmes,” she said, dropping into a chair and crossing her legs. 

“Miss Adler, I presume.”

They stared at each other for a moment, until I began to feel very uncomfortable. Rather as if I’d walked in on an intimate moment. “Could you put on some clothes?” I suggested politely. 

“No,” Irene said. “The ink’s still drying. Don’t pretend you don’t know where to look.” A little smile quirked her blood red lips when she glanced at Sherlock. “And you, you’re looking at something different.” She folded her arms helpfully over her generous bosom. 

“That isn’t why we’re here,” Sherlock said tersely. 

“No, you’re here because you think you’ll obtain the photographs I took of that book, but that isn’t going to happen, so we might as well have some pleasant conversation. What did you think of Brichester? If you’ve ever been to Arkham in Massachusetts it’s really so very similar. I wonder if that was by plan or consequence.”

At this point their conversation continued, and about what I couldn’t imagine, though something about the way they looked at each other made me want to suggest baby names. And I’d definitely never thought I’d have _that_ sort of thought when it came to Sherlock Holmes. 

But I was no longer privy to the conversation, since I stepped out of the room. I stepped out to flick a lighter up to the smoke detector, as Sherlock had instructed me in the car ride over. When it started to beep, I walked back in just in time to see Sherlock moving across the room and saying, “... and as I expected, the photographs are in this room. At sounds of danger, a mother would look towards her baby, and I saw where you looked just now, very clearly…” He was standing in front of a bookshelf, and chose (seemingly at random, though I assume it was not) a book, which he pulled out, and the bookshelf began to revolve. “Let’s just say I hope you don’t have a baby in here.”

The shelf spun. There was a room behind it. And there was a baby in it.

Well, it was not actually a baby. Even though the creature in the bassinet was, most likely, a _young_ thing. In the animal world, even the strangest looking tend to be cute when they’re young. Whatever was in the bassinet was an exception to the rule. One moss-colored limb flailed out towards Sherlock and both he and I jumped backwards with extraordinary speed.

However, Sherlock, somehow maintaining his wits about him, snapped a picture with his camera phone.

“Well that’s unfortunate,” said Irene Adler, and launched herself at Sherlock. It was a strange sort of attack, and one that I could not react quickly enough to. Her palm, covered with the darkest rune on her body, pressed to his forehead, and Sherlock went down, his eyes rolling in the back of his head. When he did not drop the phone he was holding, she slapped him hard, and then his limbs went slack and it rolled to the floor.

When I moved towards them to help, Irene held up her palm towards me, the rune glowing ominously, and I stopped in my tracks. “He’ll be fine,” she said, and with her other hand, twiddled fingers at Sherlock’s phone. Deleting the photograph, I assumed.

Then she dropped the phone onto his chest and he made a confused moaning sort of sound.

“Remember this moment, Mr. Holmes,” she purred. “That I was the woman who beat you.” And then the rune on her palm glowed even brighter as I stared at it, and if anything else happened after that, I do not remember it at all.

What I do remember is Sherlock and I waking up on the floor of the empty room. Empty from Miss Adler, and empty from whatever was in that room behind the bookcase. We picked ourselves up and made our way back to 221B in relative silence. When we arrived, Sherlock phoned his brother and informed him that there was no need to retrieve the photographs of the Necronomicon pages, since whatever ritual Irene had needed them for, she had clearly already performed.

I deduced a couple of days later that deleting the photograph from Sherlock’s phone had not been all that Irene Adler had been doing with it. Because he began to receive a ludicrous number of text messages, each signaled by the same low, moaning sound. I recognized it as a syllable from a ritual chant, but I’d never heard one performed quite so orgasmically. But whatever Irene Adler was texting to Sherlock Holmes, it was never enough to prompt him to text her back. 

And besides those occasional noises emanating from my friend’s pocket, we did not hear another word about Irene Adler for months. When we finally did, it was the day after the winter solstice, and Mycroft arrived in his hooded robe to fetch Sherlock to identify a body. I went as well, and even I could identify Irene on the stone slab, her body drained of blood, skin smeared with both red and green. The runes on her skin had paled to a sickly yellow, and her eyes were gray and lifeless. 

Sherlock did not speak for a long moment. Then finally he said, “You told me she was a professional sacrifice. I assume this is one of _yours_ gone too far?”

Mycroft considered him evenly for a moment, then said, “It was not one of mine.” By which I assumed he meant, none of the royal family, which was troubling, of course, because no one else should have access to the kind of power that came with human sacrifice…

I watched Sherlock as he looked at the body, and imagined what he was thinking about the death of the woman who beat him. I almost expected, for a moment, to hear that moaning sound coming from his phone. We left, and days passed, and then months, and it never came.

Sherlock began composing on his violin, and the melody was so beautiful and disharmonious that every time I heard it I felt that I went a little more mad. I learned not to ask him about it, or about her, and to not say her name at all. Mycroft never told us what came of it. And no one ever mentioned a _young thing_ and what it might mean. 

And then, on the night of the summer solstice, I heard the sound again. The moan. Sherlock flew across the room faster than I’d ever seen him move outside of a fight, groping for his phone and then staring at it.

“Sherlock, she’s _dead_ ,” I blurted, because surely someone was playing a horrible joke on him.

But he ignored me utterly, and darted across the room to the mantle, where there was an envelope sitting just beside Sherlock’s prized human skull, and I couldn’t imagine how it had gotten there or how neither of us had noticed it before. He ripped open the envelope, and read the letter inside. Twice, judging by the movement of his eyes.

And even though I knew that it was a horrible invasion of his privacy, when he dropped the paper in order to stare at what was clearly an enclosed photograph, I walked over and picked it up to read it.

_MY DEAR SHERLOCK,_

_You really did it very well. The alarm at my home was a masterful move, and once I saw how I had betrayed myself I had to think very quickly. I apologize for bringing about that small amount of madness for both you and Dr. Watson, but I imagine it made hardly a dent in the end. But then, I had already been watching you for some time, and was mostly happy to have finally had a chance to go up against the great detective I had heard so much about._

_My apologies if you were upset by my death. I assure you that it was upsetting for me as well, but then, reagents have come a long way, and I made certain to make myself indispensable to those employing me. You may inform the royal family that my use for the rituals are done. I keep the photographs of the pages only to preserve a weapon which will always secure me from any steps they might choose to take in the future._

_However, I suspect that my marriage might prevent that anyway. I hope that you remain alive to see everything that will come of it. When the royal family falls to something greater, remember me. I leave a photograph as proof of my new status as both alive and betrothed; and I remain, dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes,_  
Very truly yours,  
IRENE ______, nee ADLER 

The surname she had signed was a series of runes that I did not recognize, and every time my eyes tried to focus on them they went slightly cross-eyed. I looked up to still see Sherlock staring at the photograph.

“Sherlock?” I said, after what felt like a very, very long moment.

“A family photograph,” was all he said, the words choked, and I knew in that moment that if I, or anyone else of normal human mind, were to gaze upon it, the consequences would be dire. I watched as Sherlock slipped it into his coat.

And that was how it all began, the end of things. My friend used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late. And when he speaks of Irene Adler, or when he refers to the photograph, the one that could drive the world mad, it is always under the honorable title of the woman.


End file.
